


Risking It All

by SylvanWitch



Series: Risky Business [5]
Category: Magnum P.I. (TV 2018)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Major Character Injury, Making Up, Non-Graphic Violence, reference to human trafficking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:15:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22424674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Gordon Katsumoto is not an easy man to woo.  Good thing Thomas Magnum has ample experience planning combat missions.
Relationships: Gordon Katsumoto/Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV
Series: Risky Business [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1603222
Comments: 22
Kudos: 103





	Risking It All

Detective Katsumoto wasn’t the kind of man you could woo in the traditional way.

Flowers he found impractical, chocolates silly, and if Magnum had talked TC into trailing an apology banner from the chopper skids, he was pretty sure Gordon would shoot him for it.

No, winning Gordon back would take skills he’d honed not in the bedroom but on the battlefield.

As a SEAL, Magnum had snuck into enemy compounds, over tripwires, and around IEDs to achieve his objective. While wooing Gordon might be a less lethal mission than the ones he’d undertaken as a SEAL, this mission’s repercussions were no less potentially explosive.

Magnum had to approach his goal of earning Gordon’s trust again with the same absolute focus, laser-sharp concentration, and fundamental commitment to achieving success at any cost that he’d used to survive his team’s most dangerous missions.

*****

Unfortunately, the combat analogy proved more apt than Magnum had planned.

He’d kept it strictly professional for weeks, staying out of HPD’s hair when he could and, when he couldn’t, taking care to be meticulously honest with Detective Katsumoto.

There was no thaw in the cool wall of professional regard Gordon had built between them.

No longer did he insult Magnum’s methods or roll his eyes at his reasons for said methods.

He didn’t even express what would have been wholly understandable impatience with Magnum’s penchant for ending up in the middle of homicide investigations.

No, they were effectively work acquaintances.

It was killing Magnum.

And then Magnum got himself kidnapped (again) in the middle of (another) human trafficking case, and his quest to regain Gordon Katsumoto’s fond regard really did nearly kill him.

Magnum’s abduction might have almost seemed fated to bring them together again, except for the fact that Magnum had lied to Gordon in pursuit of the very bad guys who were loudly planning his torture and death not far from where his hands were cuffed over his head to what seemed like a solid metal bar welded to the ship’s bulkhead, probably the rung of a ladder.

When Magnum had told Gordon, “I have no idea where they are,” he’d been standing on the pier beside the _Aegean Princess_ , a container ship inbound from Thailand, on which, he had ample evidence to suggest, were a dozen boys and girls from Indonesia whose parents had no expectation of seeing them again.

Magnum had aimed to prove those parents happily wrong, but to sneak aboard the heavily guarded freighter and release the children, he’d needed stealth—not the full-frontal assault favored by the HPD, SWAT, and HRT.

So, there he’d been, once more lying to Gordon, the one person in the world he wanted to tell the truth.

To say “I love you” one more time, just in case.

To ask, “Forgive me?” and hold his breath until Gordon answered.

Instead, he’d said goodbye like he wasn’t about to put his life on the line and then dropped his phone in the water, so it couldn’t be traced.

Forty minutes later, bagged, bound, beaten, and bloody, Magnum took another shot to the ribs and thought, “I’m sorry, Gordon,” because he was pretty sure they were going to kill him.

They’d stopped asking him questions at least fifteen minutes before and were beating him now just for the hell of it, he thought.

They’d left the bag over his head, so he couldn’t anticipate the blows, which came at odd intervals and from all sides. His ears were ringing, and though it was hard to tell from beneath the hood, he thought his left eye was already swollen shut.

More troubling was the pressure he could feel across his lower abdomen. They’d varied their pummeling routine with kicks to his belly and thighs and more intimate regions, and he thought he might be bleeding internally.

He was beginning to deeply regret drowning his phone before he’d climbed aboard the ship.

He was regretting even more the steadily building throb he could feel through his feet, knowing it meant that the engines were coming online, and the ship was about to leave port.

His capture had alerted the traffickers to their situation, and they were cutting their losses. No doubt when they got out to open waters, they’d throw him and the kids overboard.

It would be a mercy if the children were dead before they hit the water, but he suspected these people didn’t know anything about mercy.

He also suspected that he’d be the only one already dead when he was tossed into the sea. He supposed it was a fitting end for a man who’d given so much to the Navy.

He only wished Gordon would know what had happened to him, that Magnum could have told him the truth on that last phone call—not because he wanted Gordon to swoop in and rescue him but because he didn’t want Gordon’s last memory of him to be another lie.

It was getting harder to breathe.

Some of that might have been the way the hood adhered to his mouth, especially when he gasped or tried to swallow a shout of pain. But some of it, Magnum knew, was because blood was starting to fill the cavity between organs and put pressure on his lungs and heart.

It was only a matter of time before he suffocated.

*****

Minutes or hours had passed when Magnum swam up out of the grey to feel that the ship was under way.

What he couldn’t feel were his hands. Given that he’d collapsed when he’d lost consciousness, it was probably a mercy that the circulation had been cut off by the cuffs digging into his wrists. He figured his captors would kill him where he was bound, so he’d never have to worry about the feeling returning to his fingers, the awful pins-and-needles prickling of returning blood flow.

Always looking on the bright side was Magnum’s specialty.

Magnum tried getting up but gave it up for a bad idea when the pain across his abdomen made him gasp and swear. He settled for slumping against the wall in a sort of half-squat, his arms extended awkwardly over his head.

He spared a thought for Higgins, who’d be pissed at him for leaving her like this. She’d already lost so much in her life; he hated to be another disappointment.

But most of Magnum’s scattered attention—the struggle to breathe was distracting, as was the growing discomfort in his gut—was given over to wondering what Gordon would do when Magnum just fell off the face of the earth, which is what it would surely seem like to him.

They’d never find his body.

The screech of rusty hinges alerted Magnum to the fact that at least one of his captors was back. He tried to brace himself for what was to come, tried to send his mind somewhere else, somewhere greener and brighter where there was no more pain and Gordon’s smile greeted him over a candlelit table.

Steps approached, quick and decisive, and he figured this was it—the traffickers were going to put him out of their misery.

A harsh voice whispered, “Close your eyes,” and before he could tell the asshole that he’d die with them open, thank you very much, the hood was being pulled from his head.

The hold was dim, but even the little light there was seemed blinding. He blinked his one good eye furiously, cursing the tears that kept him from seeing clearly who his executioner would be.

A hand at his wrist startled him, and he kicked weakly, thrashing in his bonds, pain tearing across his belly, making him cry out.

“Magnum, it’s me,” the voice said, and Magnum stilled, unable to believe what he was hearing.

“G-gordon?” he tried, but his breath was so short, the pain so huge that he didn’t think he’d made himself understood.

A gentle hand on his bruised cheek, a bracing hand beneath his armpit confirmed that it was Gordon Katsumoto helping him to his feet, leaning him up against the bulkhead, easing the pressure on his wrists, saying, “You look like hell,” and then letting out a shaking breath.

When Magnum’s vision finally cleared, he saw in the dim light cast by Gordon’s cell phone that his rescuer was wearing the expression of an avenging angel—righteous fury, terrible justice, and a firm determination to bring down whoever had done this to him.

“Hey,” he managed as Gordon worked on picking the cuffs, but it cost him. When he tried to draw breath for a second word, he could only manage a strangled wheeze.

Cuffs defeated, Gordon got an arm around his back, said, “Hang on, Magnum, this is going to hurt,” and proceeded to half-drag, half-carry Magnum through a door, up a ladder and out a hatch, down a passageway, up another ladder—Magnum, who was trained to pay attention to such things even under fire, lost track, the pain making him nauseous and dizzy, Gordon’s steady stream of invective-peppered encouragement keeping him conscious…barely.

When he caught his first strong whiff of dock water and diesel fumes, he regained a little of himself, enough to gasp, “Kids?”

“Higgins is getting them out,” Gordon murmured against his ear, and then someone was on his blind side, a broad shoulder and another familiar voice, Rick’s, saying, “You look like hell,” which was becoming something of a theme.

The boost up into TC’s chopper cost him the last of his reserves of strength, and he lay on his back on the floor gaping like a landed fish, desperate to take a full breath.

“Prop him up,” Rick said, and hands pulled him into a sitting position. He felt the hard edge of the chopper seat digging into his back, but his entire diminishing focus was on trying to take in air.

He felt like he was drowning on dry land, and he turned wide eyes to Gordon, wanting to reach out to him, get his attention, hold his hand for the last breath. He had no strength, though, and Gordon was looking the other way, off toward the stern, where the containers were stacked.

Dimly, Magnum remembered there was something in those containers, something important, but he couldn’t hold onto the thought.

Rick was kneeling beside him, saying, “Hey! Hey, TM, you aren’t going anywhere, you hear me? Magnum, stay with me. Magnum!”

He wanted to tell Rick to stop shouting, he was right here and could hear him fine, but he struggled to respond, to say anything.

He didn’t have the strength to even turn his head now, and the range of vision in his one good eye was slowly shrinking, grey closing in at the edges, but Magnum was content that at least the last person he would see was Gordon, still standing stolid and sure, assault rifle in his big, competent hands, keeping watch.

“Magnum!” he heard distantly. “Thomas!” even fainter. Through a hazy veil, he saw Gordon turn toward him, saw his lips moving, his hand reaching out.

He wished he could feel that hand cupping his cheek one more time, but before Gordon could reach him, he disappeared.

*****

Magnum first realized he was alive when the sensation of someone holding his hand pierced the haze of semi-consciousness and brought him all the way back into the waking world.

SERE training had taught him how to feign unconsciousness to mine his surroundings of useful intel, so he kept his eyes closed and his breathing even and slow and tallied the evidence: Vague bleach smell from the sheets, regular pattern of beeps from the monitor, mouth like a grave, and a large, strong, warm hand cradling his own, careful of the place where the IV cannula wormed into a vein there.

“Hey,” Gordon said, low and close, and Magnum let his good eye drift open, turning his head slowly and carefully on the pillow, so he could see him clearly.

“Hey,” Magnum tried. It came out broken, though, and before he could try again, Gordon had a straw to his lips, saying, “Slowly,” as Magnum took in the miracle of lukewarm tap water.

Gordon pulled the straw away before Magnum could take his fill, and he made a face, which strained the stitches over his left eye and set the bruises on his cheek to throbbing.

Gordon touched his other cheek with the backs of his fingers and said, “There you are.”

Magnum was gratefully astonished to see that Gordon’s eyes were wet with unshed tears.

“Hey,” he tried again, and Gordon smiled, just a weak thing, relief and fear and exhaustion in it. 

“You look like hell,” Magnum said, and Gordon gave a short huff of laughter, expression sliding into something more familiar—fond exasperation.

“You should talk,” he answered, ghosting the pads of his fingers across Magnum’s swollen cheek. Then he dropped his forehead—gingerly—against Magnum’s own, and they stayed that way for a while, just breathing each other’s air.

Memory jolted him, and he bumped their foreheads together enough to cause them both to wince. Gordon moved a little away, eyebrow raised, and Magnum said, “The kids?”

“They’re alright, all of them. Higgins got them out, thanks to you.” Gordon drew a little away, but before Magnum could protest the distance between them, he picked up Magnum’s hand and squeezed, gently, before lifting it so he could kiss the place where the tape for the IV pulled at the skin. “She tracked the Ferrari to where you left it on Sand Island, and we extrapolated from there where you’d be.”

“I disabled the low-jack,” Magnum said.

“She installed a back-up after the last time you got yourself into hot water.” 

The words were meant to be lighthearted, but Gordon’s face betrayed him, and a slurry of cold fear washed through Magnum’s belly.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked, dreading the answer but needing to hear it. He wasn’t so fragile that he couldn’t take the truth. 

Gordon shook his head and looked away, staring toward the far wall but obviously not seeing anything in the room with them.

“Hey,” Magnum said quietly, moving his hand in Gordon’s enough to draw him back. “Tell me?”

Still looking away, Gordon said, “I thought I’d lost you,” in a hoarse voice that sounded like a stranger’s. He cleared his throat and swallowed visibly.

Magnum tightened his hold on Gordon’s hand and wished he was strong enough to sit up and put his arms around him.

“When I came through that door, I thought you were—” 

A shake of his head, as though he was trying to dislodge the memory. “You looked dead, Thomas. And all I could think was that I’d never have the chance to tell you I was sorry.”

“Sorry for what? I was the one who lied to you.” Magnum felt the same swooping panic and crushing regret then that he’d experienced months ago when Gordon had walked out of his life. Still, he couldn’t take it back or undo the damage. “Again,” he added, reluctant to remind Gordon of how Magnum had ended up in that hold to begin with but wanting a clean slate between them. 

At last, Gordon looked at him. “You did,” he agreed, dropping his eyes to their entwined hands. “But I lied to you, too. When I said you lived in a dream, and I couldn’t share it. When I said you had nothing of value to give.” He took a deep, shaking breath and tightened his hold on Magnum’s hand, to the point that Magnum felt the cannula beneath the skin, felt a pinching discomfort.

There wasn’t a torturer in the world who’d have gotten him to confess that minor pain to Gordon. It felt too good to have his touch.

“I was scared, Thomas. Scared of how I felt. How strongly I felt. How much I loved— _love_ —you. And I used the excuse of you lying to me, so I could run away without looking like a coward.”

“You’re not a coward, Gordon,” Magnum said. “You could never be a coward.”

Gordon’s breathy laugh was bitter. “You have too much faith in me.”

“Yeah? Well, you don’t have enough in yourself,” Magnum answered at once. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. I lied to you back then, and I lied to you—” He broke off, realizing he had no idea what day it was.

Gordon smirked wryly, realizing Magnum’s predicament. “Two days ago.”

Two? Where had he lost one? But that was beside the point.

“I’m sorry,” Magnum said. “I’m so sorry. I knew what I was doing, and I did it anyway. I just—”

“It’s fine, Magnum. I know why you did it.” Gordon’s eyes caught and held Magnum’s own.

“You do?” Magnum felt a flutter of nervous hope under his breastbone.

“You figured you were the only one who could save those kids without getting them killed. As usual, you put your own safety last to help others. And you didn’t want to put me in a position of having to lie to my superiors later if it came to light that I knew what you were going to do and didn’t try to stop you.”

Gordon shrugged. “I get it.”

Magnum couldn’t help the smile that broke over his face then, even if it did hurt like a son of a bitch, opening his split lip, so he tasted metal on his tongue.

Gordon made a noise, then, a cut-off little sound, and closed the gap between them to press his lips—gently, so gently—to the unwounded corner of Magnum’s mouth.

“I love you, you stubborn idiot, and if you ever do anything like that again, I’ll kill you myself,” he said, his words washing over Magnum’s lips in a burst of warmth.

Magnum, unmindful of the pain or blood, reclaimed Gordon’s mouth for a long, deep kiss that went on until he felt a warning twinge in his lungs and the dull throb across his abdomen arced into something sharper.

He let his head fall back to the pillow, panting, and said, “To be continued?”

“Always,” Gordon answered, resting his forehead once more against Magnum’s, obviously trying to catch his own breath.

It sounded like a promise, one that they would both keep.

*****

Three days later, Higgins wheeled Magnum out of the front doors of the hospital and into the brilliant midday sun. Magnum, who was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, squinted nonetheless. He felt like he’d been underground for days.

Part of that was the dreams of a dark, stuffy hold, of bound hands and blindness and a desperate helplessness that left him more exhausted when he awoke than he’d been when he fell asleep. He was relieved almost to the point of tears to be leaving the hospital, anxious to sleep in his own bed, to have the sure and solid presence of Gordon beside him, to feel safe and mostly whole again.

Gordon was leaning against the hood of his personal vehicle, passenger door already open, engine rumble a quiet backdrop to the usual city noises.

He pushed away as Higgins brought the wheelchair to a stop nearby. The orderly who’d followed them out waited patiently a few feet away, giving them an illusion of privacy but there if they needed his help.

“I’ll pick these up,” she said, indicating the prescriptions in her hand, “And bring them by later. I know you won’t take the painkillers, Magnum, but take the antibiotics, yes? And the sleeping pills, if you need them.”

“I won’t need them,” Magnum answered, capturing Gordon’s eyes and holding the look.

Gordon said, “Thank you, Juliet. I’ll make sure he gets what he needs.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said, a knowing smirk in her voice as she turned to go.

Magnum made to rise from the chair, and Gordon was there with a firm hand beneath the arm on his less-injured side, taking some of his weight and easing him carefully into the passenger seat.

As he leaned over Magnum to fasten the seat belt, Magnum breathed, “Just like old times,” and Gordon paused to turn his head and brush a kiss across Magnum’s lips.

“Better,” Gordon said, pulling away and closing the door.

Magnum, who got winded just getting dressed, let his eyes close as Gordon got in, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb.

He didn’t sleep, precisely, but let himself drift in that in-between place where the line between sleep and waking blurred.

When he felt the car come to a stop, he opened his eyes to see the vast blue stretch of the sea in front of them.

He turned his head against the headrest and saw Gordon’s eyes on him, his smile wide, heat and love in his eyes.

Slowly, Gordon unfastened his seatbelt and Magnum’s.

Slowly, he reached over to cup Magnum’s nape in his big, warm hand.

Slowly, he leaned over the center console, eyes fixed on Magnum’s lips, which Magnum found himself licking nervously, as if this was their first kiss, and he wasn’t sure he would get it right.

He had nothing to worry about.

Gordon’s mouth was a warm, steady pressure on his own, the kiss almost chaste except for the way it made Magnum’s heart kick against his ribs. He opened his mouth to take a breath, and Gordon slid his tongue inside, hot and wet and perfect.

Magnum tilted his head, opening his mouth wider, and couldn’t stop a groan from rumbling out of him when Gordon deepened the kiss, licking the roof of his mouth and then pulling away only far enough to nip Magnum’s lower lip.

“God, I love you,” Gordon said when he was done reducing Magnum to a panting mess. “And when you’re well again, I’m going to spend hours showing you just how much.”

Magnum, who was still too exhausted and sore to participate in the activities Gordon was suggesting, made a noise of frustration. “Don’t tease.”

“It’s not teasing if I mean to follow through,” Gordon answered, echoing Magnum’s own words from so long ago. 

“Take me home?” Magnum asked, though his sexy intent was somewhat ruined by a jaw-cracking yawn.

“I’ll take you anywhere I can have you,” Gordon said, refastening Magnum’s seatbelt and his own.

“Hey,” he said, reaching over to put his hand on Gordon’s before he could put the car in gear.

Gordon looked at him, eyes bright with love and desire, mouth still wet and red from their kissing.

“I love you, Gordon Katsumoto,” Magnum said, words a little slurred, eyes already closing.

Before he let himself fall into the dark well of sleep, he felt Gordon turn his hand over, place a kiss on his palm, and curl his fingers over it, as if to save the kiss for later.

“Sweet dreams, Thomas.”

They were.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been a delightful writing experience. I've felt very welcome in the fandom and am honored to be able to contribute these stories to help our little fandom grow. I don't know if these two adorable dorks will whisper in my ear again, but I'm so glad they did the first time! Thank you for reading and for your lovely, encouraging comments.


End file.
